After seven episodes of MobLand, the show’s basic roadmap was pretty easy to follow. Due to some Harrigan or other’s bluster, backstabbing, incompetence, psychosis, or just plain bad luck, Harry has to race around cleaning up their messes without losing his marriage. Or raising his voice above a conversational volume for that matter, even when there are guns blazing. This gives Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren a chance to skillfully chew the scenery, Paddy Considine and Joanne Froggat a chance to generate pathos, and Tom Hardy a chance to show that he’s a natural born action hero, provided you don’t want your hero to actually be heroic. The episode builds to some big twist or reveal or cliffhanger, and bob’s your uncle.

Well. So much for that!

MobLand’s eighth episode is the most eventful of the season so far, and by a comfortable margin at that. What’s more, it hints that this still isn’t MobLand’s final form — that the depth of key performances, the increasingly byzantine and sticky web of relationships both open and secret, and a real willingness to do things you simply don’t expect it to do may yet take the show from “not bad” to “pretty freaking good.”

Harry’s primary task at first is to shuttle a bloodied and badly shaken Seraphina back from Amsterdam to the Harrigan compound in the UK. There she is welcomed with open arms by, of all people, Maeve, who says Seraphina’s effort to help her half-brother Brendan (doomed through no fault of their own) makes her a full-blooded Harrigan. Of course, this is bullshit: Maeve starts planting nasty ideas about Seraphina in her half-brother Kevin’s head.

Kevin isn’t buying it, which only makes Maeve madder. She insists that either Kevin or his brother, not “that baseborn bastard” Seraphina, should lead the family into the future. When Kevin points out to this truly exhausting person that his brother is now dead, Maeve growls “Your other brother,” making Kevin as angry as we’ve ever seen him. Right away begins tracking down the prison guard who raped him years earlier, seemingly as a way to blow off steam.

I think it’s pretty clear as to why Kevin is so infuriated. For one thing, he seems aware that his father Conrad’s relationship with his wife, Bella, is still an ongoing thing, however many years ago he effectively bought her and sold her to Kevin as a kind of romantic consolation prize. 

For another, Maeve sure has seemed otherwise inexplicably supportive of Eddie Harrigan, Kevin’s ostensible son — basically leapfrogging a generation of leadership to groom someone manifestly unfit for the job. Yeah, when it comes to who Kev’s mystery brother is, there’s really only one candidate, and it’s his “son,” Eddie. 

Okay, so I suppose it could be Harry, whom Conrad calls his “son” to show his appreciation for the rescue of Seraphina. But that’s a little less juicy that the quasi-incestuous angle, innit?

Speaking of our boy Eddie, his sexual escapades with Harry’s daughter Gina are, by now, the talk of the compound. Harry’s conversation with the guy about the relationship is marvelously written. Eddie preemptively launches into a whole spiel about how if a Harrigan says frog, Harry jumps, he’s just some loser gofer, Eddie’s the future of the family, he’ll do whatever he want to Gina who’s quite enjoying the rogering she’s getting, blah blah blah. In other words, he reacts just how you’d expect an asshole to react.

Not so Harry. Gently, he explains to Eddie that while he cares deeply about his child, as all fathers do about their children, part of that care comes down to respecting Gina, an intelligent person, to make her own choices. If she chooses Eddie, well, Harry wishes them well, asking only that they be kind to one another. Legitimately surprised, and maybe even a little moved — I don’t get the impression anyone in his family, not even the doting Maeve, speaks to him with this kind of man-to-man respect — Eddie says thank you, and Harry leaves.

…For about five seconds, after which point Harry knocks on the bedroom door once again and promises Eddie he’ll follow him all the way up the ladder to the top just so he can push him off someday. Once again, Eddie is left without a pissy little comeback. He’s clearly used to being the most verbally dextrous man in any room willing to admit him, but he uses it to bluster and preen. Harry uses his way with words to make promises, not threats, and he does so without ever raising his voice. That’s not something Eddie knows what to do with.

But he knows what to do with Gina alright. Harry leaves the Cotswolds to return to London and broker a meeting between Conrad and Jaime López — the man who killed Brendan, but whose defiance of Richie Stevenson’s order to kill Seraphina too means there might be some daylight between those two partners. Conrad is trying to steal away Richie’s main fentanyl supplier, and he’s put Harry in charge of making the arrangements. 

So Eddie and Gina get right back to fucking, loudly enough for various parents to hear. Gina’s acting out, of course, but can you blame her? When Harry gently tries to scare her away from Eddie by telling her he’s a psychotic murderer, Gina casually informs him about the Electra complex, in which women seek out romantic partners who are like their fathers. It’s a mic-drop moment for the girl, because what’s Harry, who killed like 15 people less than 24 hours ago, gonna say in response?

Harry’s London trip is…eventful. Meeting up with Freddie (Bradley Turrner), his inside man in the Stevenson organization, he learns that one of the Harrigans is already in on the fentanyl action with the rival family. We don’t hear who or what the guy says, but it apparently prompts Harry to dump him off the roof for his troubles. 

Harry’s next stop is a video call with Kat McAllister, the American who stoped López from carving up Seraphina. It’s not clear who or even what Kat is, or does. Is she a crime boss? An intelligence operative? Doctor Doom? Whoever she is, even Conrad himself is intimidated by her, warning Harry not to get too deep in debt to her. But by the time the episode is over, she makes clear that Harry now owes her two favors. If Conrad is worried about what those could be, hoo boy.

The interesting thing about all this, though, is that Harry has begun indicating he’s aware of just how fall the Harrigans have fallen. Before he kills the guy, he tells his inside man that Maeve now runs the family, and “the king is dead.” He claims that he and Kevin are planning to take things over, though if that’s true I don’t recall hearing a whisper of it before. Maybe it’s just a smokescreen to get Freddie to cough up intel, but I mean, he’s not lying about what’s going on at the top, and how much better off they’d be with cooler heads like Kevin and Harry in charge. Unless, of course, Kevin’s already in bed with the Stevensons, which is the kind of thing I might toss someone off a parking-garage roof to keep quiet if I were in Harry’s shoes. (And, y’know, had his cavalier attitude about the sanctity of human life and all.)

And don’t let’s forget the other participants in this war: the cops. The Harrigans have been doggedly pursued from the jump by two detectives, Fisk (Mably) and Mukasa (Gemma Knight Jones) — they brought Harry in for questioning early on, they recovered the body of the advisor Conrad murdered at Maeve’s behest, they coordinate with Alice on her undercover work with Jan, etc. 

Alice has some problems on her hands. Once again mildly terrorizing Jan, Conrad forces her to let him call this mysterious Alice and invite her to dinner. The cops all assume he wants to fuck her; personally I doubt it, but they advise her to lingerie herself up just in case.

As for Fisk and Mukasa…yeah, as for them. In a move they would eventually come to regret, were they still alive to do so, their unit brings in a retired detective named Colin Tattersall (Toby Jones is on this show now!). An owlish man, his prescription for how to take the Harrigans down belies his mild-mannered appearance: He suggests joining forces with the Stevensons and offering Richie a years-long period of immunity for any crimes committed in exchange for his help dismantling Conrad’s empire.

Fisk and Mukasa go along with the plan, so far as it goes. But when Richie demands to know who’s wearing the pants in this relationship, Mukasa summarily rejects the idea that it’s ever going to be Richie. So Richie straight up murders two London PD organized-crime task force detectives in front of multiple witnesses…including Tattersal, who’s more than happy to let Richie lead the joint operation after all, just like the gangsters who teamed with the cops to take out their rivals did back in the old days. (Tattersall had previously suggested Richie would have a grudge against him for twice putting him away for decade-long bids. Guessing that was bullshit!)

So, what have we learned? We’ve learned that the Harrigan family’s quasi-incestuous depravity runs deeper than we knew, and may have lasting ramifications in the person of Eddie, presumably Conrad’s secret son with his (still!) lover Bella, his son Kevin’s wife. It’s safe to assume Harry and Eddie are going to have issues sooner rather than later. Richie Stevenson now runs the cops’ war on the Harrigans, in partnership with an ex-cop who has no problem setting up his fellow coppers to be killed. A key asset in that war, Emily, is now directly in Conrad’s crosshairs. Harry’s aware that Maeve is calling the shots for the family now, no matter how Conrad spins it, and that she’s crazier than a shithouse rat. There remains a traitor within the family, and whoever it is, it has Harry freaked out enough to kill a man spectacularly in broad daylight over it. 

But we’ve learned more than that. This episode’s dense writing, a latticework of overlapping and intertwined relationships and rivalries, makes the Harrigans seem more interesting than ever before. Conrad’s still with Bella, and Eddie’s maybe their son, and Kevin maybe knows it. Gina’s using sex to — well, to get off, presumably, but beyond that to get back at her father, who she knows is ultimately just an Eddie figure with better manners and impulse control. For all her independence, which for understandable reasons may be less of a priority for her now, Seraphina is still moved and touched by being welcomed into the Harrigan fold by Maeve, which will make her disappointment and anger when she learns she’s been lied to all the stronger. Kevin is going to stalk and kill his rapist. Harry can get a gun pulled on him by gangsters (at least twice in this episode alone) or learn that his daughter is sleeping with a homicidal maniac and still never get a pulse above 80. 

In short? These people are interesting. Their relationships are interesting. Their jobs are interesting. Their world is interesting. And most importantly, the way creator Ronan Bennett, co-writer Jez Butterworth, and director Lawrence Gough are depicting all this is, itself, interesting. The deeper we get into the crime shenanigans, the more complex and engaging the characters become. 

It’s worth keeping in mind that many shows, even many great shows, start simple and broad before their focus sharpens and their strength increases. Just to cite one extremely mighty example, The Sopranos was always terrific, but it wasn’t until midway through Season 3, during an incident involving Ralph Cifaretto, a stripper named Tracee, and a parking lot, that it truly became THE SOPRANOS. Mad Men was making corny jokes about how “there’s no magic machine that makes copies” in its pilot episode, but by the end of its first season it had created a rivalry storyline between main character Don Draper and his young nemesis Pete Campbell that simply never went where I expected it to go. 

Is MobLand either of those shows? I’d say “no, of course not,” but I’m never gonna sell this particular cast short. If someone gave this crew Sopranos-level scripts, I have no doubt they’d nail it. My point is simply that a rising tide lifts all boats, and this episode is a rising tide. The twisty plot, the twisted secrets, the idiosyncratic and engaging lead performance of Tom Hardy, the reliably keen work of everyone else in the cast — there’s something here, I think, something potentially fascinating. And if worse comes to worst, all we get is a fun British gangster show with a crackerjack crew of actors. Every show should be so lucky as to have that for their worst case scenario.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.